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Understanding Rape as Event and Narrative
Swati Ganguly
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Rape has been the rallying point of feminist activism and analysis all over the world. In India where sexual violence tends to be both ubiquitous and invisible, it is feminists who have taken the initiative to demonstrate, organize protests, campaign and lobby for legal reform ’ .1 However, in the gang rape of the 23 year old paramedical student, Jyoti Singh Pandey, which occurred in Delhi on 16th December 2012, there was an overwhelming public outrage and protest. Feminists were joined by citizens who would perhaps resent having anything to do with feminism. This public response to the incident of the rape in Delhi has been hailed by many as a spontaneous and sustained civil society uprising on an issue that squarely concerns ‘women.’

This concern of civil society is usually explained as follows: the incident had struck a deep chord with the average citizens because its circumstances were ordinary, one that they could identify with; that the rape was brutal and the young woman had evinced extraordinary courage. 2 (emphasis is mine). Indeed the media continually referred to the young woman as Nirbhaya (the Fearless One) and Braveheart. Last year also witnessed a commemoration of the ‘grit’ and extraordinary courage of this young woman through the institution of a Nirbhaya Award. The celebratory rhetoric surrounding the phenomenon tends to occlude a question which I think has serious consequences for feminisms. Why did citizens protest in such an overwhelming manner to an incident of rape on this particular occasion, given that in the past rape has been perceived as a concern of women’s organizations or feminists? I wish to suggest that if we bring all the individual elements of this particular event of rape and subject it to scrutiny it would be possible to suggest what occurred was a complex event-narrative intertwining in which the event was a narrative of ‘real rape’ understood through the narrativizing of the event especially in the media.

Lest this sound bizarre let me invoke feminists who work in the areas of jurisprudence. They have pointed out that within the framework of law what constitutes rape is premised on the consent of the woman which is in turn hinged on the ‘interpretation’ of the ‘telling of a story of rape or abuse.’3 Typically the binary logic of law fails to comprehend ‘ambiguities’ inherent within this ‘telling’ or narrativizing. As Catherine Mackinnon points out patriarchal law invariably establishes woman’s culpability since it chooses to interpret ambiguities in favour of men’s versions of events.’4 This essay is not directly concerned with this specific field of feminist engagement with legal discourse on rape. I cite this to draw attention to the significant role played by ‘narrative’ in understanding the event of rape.

I draw upon the rich and diverse field of narrative theory selectively. In the first section I use the term narrative in the sense that Jean Francoise Lyotard does. Lyotard, working with the etymological root-gnarus (to know) identifies narratives as the communal method by which knowledge is stored and exchanged within a given society and culture.5 In my discussion of the response to the rape I propose it was narratives that affected the deep structures of collective or communal psyche. I further propose that in patriarchy the power of narratives is linked to the function of ‘propriation’ especially as it pertains to the place of woman. Commenting on Derrida writing under the sign of woman Spivak notes ‘Derrida’s discovery of the figure of woman is in terms of a critique of propriation-proper-ing, as in the proper name (patronymic) or property.’6

Arun  KolatkarEvent as narrative: the rape of Jyoti Singh Pandey

Let me begin trying to unpack the idea of event as a narrative.7 It is possible to think of narrative as a ‘cognitive process by which the subject constructs meaningful realities.’ These acts of making meaning are premised on category formations or differentiations. A social structure-indeed any system of meaning-becomes sustainable through a process of differentiation. Following the works of anthropologists like Edmund Leach and Mary Douglas it is possible to posit that, boundary-formation or the drawing of borders that mark and separate it from the ‘other’ is of crucial significance for any culture.8

Yet, in the sex/gender system, the deeply asymmetrical relations between men and women in the field of sexual relations making this differentiation between the self/other, the legitimate/ illegitimate, the permissible/ non-permissible can be tricky. Sexual intercourse in socially sanctioned relationships often includes male coercion and violence. One way of constructing and maintaining this differentiation is by invoking the notion of ‘real rape’, a phrase used by feminist lawyers and activists to signify cases that are admissible to the police and lawyers as unambiguous. As Nivedita Menon observes, ‘a ‘real’ rape has to involve strangers, the use of weapons and a public scene.’9 I draw upon this notion of ‘real rape’ and extend it beyond legal discourse to narratives, suggesting that it constitutes the ‘always-already’, which exerts an immense hold on the imaginary. A scrutiny of the happenings on the night of 16th December 2012 reveals what occurred is an actualization of this always-already, the narrative of ‘real rape’ which in turn facilitated the narrativizing of the event in the media. A story, in a news magazine with reputation for serious analysis begins as follows: ‘She boarded a bus in Munirka to return home to Dwarka… after an evening show of Life of Pi. What the six men on it did to her on that ride, is unspeakably horrific, and on the other, cannot be told brutally enough.’10 In the fortnight that followed the rape, investigative reporting revealed details of the incident of sexual assault; these were woven into narratives which re-played continually in the electronic media came to haunt the public imaginary. I shall reconstruct one version of this, through a mimicry of what I have just quoted, this time fully fleshed out:

‘They had walked to the nearest bus stop after watching a show of Life of Pi. It was winter night, but not too late. As they waited a bus drew up; an adolescent boy, perhaps the helper of the conductor, used a familial term to address her, yes they would be going that way. The young woman and her friend boarded the bus which promised to take them to the safety of their home. It turned out to be a nightmare ride.
The teenage boy, the one who had ushered them into the bus, was the most perverse of the assailants. He not only raped the young woman twice but also inserted his hand through her vagina and ripped out her intestines. This genital-visceral mutilation was horrifying also because it was a travesty of trust, a betrayal that was bewildering because it bordered on the fantastic-the four men who had posed as passengers were in reality cohorts of the driver, out on a masculine joy ride of loot and plunder. Soon they began a casual sexual teasing aimed at her, which spun out of control, escalated into violence and finally multiple rape. In an ultimate act of audacity the bus was driven through the city going round in circles, while tinted glass windows blocked visibility as the rapists took turns to ravish the young woman, stripped and threw her on the flyover with her companion.

That she survived was a miracle; in a remarkable display of the will to live and fight back the young woman narrated the events of the sexual assault, its brutality which had mutilated her beyond any medical intervention. This became the dying statement of this courageous young woman, whose death caused a nation to mourn.’

The power of this narrative to affect the collective was immense. It manifested itself in a nation united in condemning the rape, and demanding justice. As narrative theorists have pointed out not only do we narrativize or put simply tell stories but stories tell us; these story tellings are always closely bound up with power, property and domination.11 This brings me to a discussion of the relation between narratives and the function of propriation in patriarchy. In the context of the phenomenon I identify two issues which are inextricably linked: a) patriarchy’s investment in identifying rape as a crime of violation of its ‘property’ in women; b) the significance of ascribing multiple ‘proper’ name(s) to the young woman whose ‘anonymity’ was being ensured for ethical reasons.

A symptomatic reading of the notion and the narrative of ‘real rape’ reveals that it is premised on the exclusion of those very facts about sexual assaults on women (and children) that feminists have been stressing for long: they occur in the privacy of home; the perpetrators are neighbours, acquaintances or members of the extended family; assault may not necessarily involve severe injury to the raped woman. It is the casual, routine, insidious nature of this sexual violence that patriarchy fails or refuses to address because of its own complicity in misogyny.

The legitimization of ‘rape culture’ goes a long way in perpetuating sexual violence against women within legitimate sexual relations as marriage. Violence in marriage can be normalized by marking it as distinct from category of rape, the non-permissible, illegitimate intercourse. It is worth reiterating that etymologically rape implies to seize, take by force or plunder property belonging to someone else. Hence patriarchy’s insistence that marital rape is inadmissible, along with the identification of rape as penile-vaginal penetration. It is crucial to underscore that this is the only recognizable form of trespassing of women as ‘property’, a process in which woman’s reproductive promise is compromised.

A ‘proper’ woman is one who is property of a single male owner, the father or husband. There is an overwhelming significance of this notion of a ‘proper woman’ in the Indian-Hindu patriarchal discourse as one who is inviolable, except by the legitimate owner. It is little wonder that a woman parliamentarian deems it proper to voice her sympathy for the young woman, long before she died a painful and protracted death, as a zinda laash or living corpse.

This idea of ‘the proper’ may be linked to the significance of propriation as the giving of a proper name. The cruel paradox about naming women is that the common noun is as much a signifier of silence and oppression as is the proper. If the common noun as in ‘the rape victim’ erases the heterogeneity of the experience of violence, the proper name evokes and reinforces the idea of rape as ‘violating other men’s property.’ The Delhi rape case brought to the fore another attempt at propriation through the electronic and print media’s competitive act of trying to create a name which would be ‘proper’ or befitting for the young woman.

The young woman who was known to her family and friends as Jyoti Singh Pandey was variously named, Amanat (trust), Damini (lightning), Anamika (one without a name), Nirbhaya (fearless), and Brave-heart. For Jyoti, fighting a losing battle in hospitals, each of these names carried cruel and ironical connotations. The giving of a name, as Gayatri Spivak suggests, however well-intentioned, ‘is always catachrestic,’ always political. ‘The devising of newer names of woman’ is ‘in the interest of giving the desire to punish the alibi of justice.12

It is evident that it was this desire to punish that fuelled the public protest, the anger at the government-administrative machinery for its failure to protect and safeguard the honour and modesty of the proper woman, their own amanat. Maintaining the anonymity of the raped woman is recognized as both ethical and legal. In this case it fed into a certain assumption about the possible middle-class-identity of this paramedical student who had gone out with her male friend/companion to watch an evening show of a film. It was this aspect that threw into sharp relief the rapists whose social profiling, undertaken by zealous investigating journalism, revealed them to be, both literally and metaphorically, marginal or liminal figures. They lived in the borderlands of the city and civil society, had histories of physical and psychological abuse and violence. It was easy to categorize them as the perverse ‘Other.’ It is worth recalling that the clamour for justice translated as a demand for swift and sure death penalty for the rapists, or as mob-lynching. In demanding capital punishment the society was expressing its revulsion for what Julia Kristeva terms the ‘abject’ ,13 the ‘other’ that needs to be violently expelled from the social body.

The public response to the rape of Jyoti Singh Pandey proved once again the validity of what feminists as literary critics have posited before, viz. ‘female chastity is not sacred out of respect for the integrity of the woman as a person; rather, it is sacred out of respect for violence.’14 If one were to agree with this feminist logic it would follow that the only way of challenging patriarchy was by nullifying what it assumes as its power of violation. In the next section I turn to the feminist strategies of such narrativizing in fiction, through the instance of Mahasweta Devi’s Draupadi. The cult status of this short story, especially in the academia, derives partially from the fact that it was translated by Gayatri Spivak. My discussion is pegged on the Bengali ‘original’ and begins with the author’s understanding of the role of narratives.

Arun  KolatkarConfronting patriarchy: the narrative turn in Mahasweta Devi’s Draupadi

In the introduction to the Sreshtha Galpo [Best Short Stories( 1984)] Mahasweta Devi states that an assessment of an author’s work is possible by a double pronged method: contextualizing it in its own time and by locating it in history. She further qualifies that her own method is to use mythical narratives, characters and events in the context of the present because she believes that in the oral-aural tradition (lokbritta) of folk culture the past and the present exist within a historical continuum. 15 Devi’s understanding of the historical necessity of taking recourse to existing narratives (myths to be specific) is uncannily close to the claims by contemporary theorists about the subversive potentials of narratives. To summarize, if narratives have been traditionally used to disadvantage specific human groups [in the Indian context, groups marginalized and exploited in the name of caste-class-community-gender] then their strategy should be to work within the narrative, to turn its figures and operations against the narrative determination. The feminist mode, as Teresa de Lauretis suggests (she is speaking about cinema), ‘should be narrative with a vengeance for it seeks to stress the duplicity of that scenario and the specific contradiction of the female subject in it.’16

Mahasweta Devi’s Draupadi is an instance of what de Lauretis identifies as the ‘contradiction by which historical women must work with and against narrative.’17 Devi’s choice of the Mahabharata allows her to assume that her implied readers are familiar with its episodes. Hence in her short story, the episode of ‘Sabhaparva’ in Mahabharata, the failed attempt to publicly disrobe Draupadi, exists as a submerged text. In this mode of intertextuality, the source ( if such a category can be evoked) is never directly alluded to, but its presence can be felt even as it over–written by the writer’s own.

In Draupadi feminist negotiations with intertextuality makes the narrative itself a palimpsest, a mode which has been identified by feminist literary critics as favourite of many women writers. A palimpsest narrative allows Devi a subtle subversion of the episode in Mahabharata, even without making the modern story ‘a refutation of the ancient.’18 Central to this palimpsest is an act of feminist dis-appropriation, an intervention in the patriarchal prerogative of propriation--ascribing a proper name of the patronymic. In Mahabharata Draupadi’s proper name connotes her father’s name; she is the daughter extension of king Drupad (literally, one who is fleet of foot).

Mahasweta Devi performs a radical feminist inscription by exploding this act of naming: her female protagonist’s name exists in a deliberate inconsistency, fractured along the axes of the sanskritized-official Draupadi and the tribal-revolutionary Dopdi. In her speculations on naming, Spivak comments that ‘either as a tribal she cannot pronounce her own Sanskrit name (Draupadi) or the tribalized form, Dopdi, is the proper name of the ancient Draupadi.’19 Yet, the point that Spivak chooses to misread is the narrative’s deliberate refusal to comply with the patriarchal binary, the either/or logic. Mahasweta’s female protagonist is a ‘palimpsest and a contradiction’ precisely because the narrative chooses the radical indeterminacy of retaining both versions and hence breaks the classical/contemporary, ancient/modern hierarchized binary in its attempt to locate the narrative in a historical continuum. For feminism the practice of re-naming or of ‘claiming that name’ asserts in one way the right to give a signifier, and destabilizes the rules of gendering identities/individualities. Mahasweta Devi goes further-she evokes the signifier, distorts it, and puts it under erasure.

The story is divided into three sections all of which begin by evoking the name of the female protagonist. In the first section her name marks the beginning of the narrative: ‘Name Dopdi Mejhen.’ This is immediately questioned by a liveried soldier as inappropriate ‘What’s this, a tribal called Dopdi? The list of names I brought has nothing like it. How can anyone have an unlisted name?’ The second livery corrects it; she is ‘Draupadi Mejhen’. This ‘pious domesticated Hindu name’ given to the tribal girl by her mistress, Surja Sahu’s wife, is not mentioned again, not even in the official dossier.

The second section retains its continuity with the earlier by beginning with the name of Dopdi. She is identified by the state-police as the key to the success of operation Jharkhani: ‘Catch Dopdi Mejhen. She will lead us to the others,’ (p 396). In this section the narrative focuses on Dopdi’s persistent refusal to respond to her name, even as the reader is left wondering if these are real or imaginary voices she hears. Dopdi knows that her name is a trap; she has acquired a new identity, the alias of Upi Mejhen in Jharkhani. Her political training of survival necessitates this dis-appropriation. It can be read as an act of feminist resistance because in it we can see what Spivak astutely analyses as the power of the ‘disenfranchised who teaches us most often by saying: … I do not recognize my share in your naming.’20

Mahasweta’s protagonist remains Dopdi throughout the first and second sections of the story. The impersonal voice of the specialist, of the ones who speak in the language of colonial-patriarchal hegemony address her as Draupadi (not Dopdi). It is only when it comes to lure her into a trap they call her Dopdi. After she is caught by Senanayak’s men the narrative remains consistent in naming her Draupadi, re-inforcing the power of propriation as ascribing a ‘proper name’-the official name of a revolutionary-terrorist which coincides with the patronymic of the heroine of Mahabharata.

While the Mahabharata disguises a voyeuristic, tantalizing narrative within the jurisprudential arguments among the aged, wise stalwarts of shastra (scripture) and ethics, in the final section of Devi’s story there is no discourse about men’s rights over women. Feminist inscription in mythical narrative requires that there be no benign paternalistic presence to miraculously save the tribal woman from being gang-raped by the repressive apparatus of the state.

It is natural for feminists to read in the incident of the gang-rape of Draupadi Mejhen, Devi’s attempt to explode the Mahabharata myth of divine intervention which saves Draupadi’s ‘modesty’ and honour. In the epic the promise of the spectacle of a disrobed, naked Draupadi is replaced by a miraculous spectacle in the form of the endless yarns of cloth provided to her by Krishna- as- Dharma, or to use Spivak’s translation, the Idea of Sustaining Law.21
In spite of the Karna’s insinuations about Draupadi’s status as a harlot-derived from her non-normative polyandry, it is this inability of men to disrobe Draupadi that makes her function as a signifier always in excess of the signs that confine other female characters to a lawful patriarchy.

Yet in Devi’s short story negotiations with myth and history cuts both ways through the act of returning the official-sanskritized name to her protagonist. The submerged Mahabharata episode of failed disrobing rises from the depths of our memory to gain a feminist inscription: Is it Draupadi, the female protagonist of the Mahabharata---the heroine, the one who according to Spivak is ‘infinitely clothed and cannot be publicly stripped’22 who is being sexually assaulted? It may be worth remembering that one of the crucial details of Draupadi’s exceptional status in the Mahabharata episode is that she is menstruating when she is dragged to the court. This makes her particularly vulnerable since she is clad, according to customary practice, in a single piece of cloth. Perhaps it this image of Draupadi’s menstrual bleeding that Mahasweta evokes as she ironically over-writes it with the tribal Draupadi Mejhen’s experience of being raped: ‘Something sticky under her ass and waist. Her own blood… She senses that her vagina is bleeding. How many came to make her?’23


The reading of Draupadi as a feminist fiction is hinged on the protagonist’s actions following her gang-rape. In her refusal to drink water, in tearing the piece of cloth proferred to her, Draupadi Mejhen regains agency. She turns herself into spectacle, subversively appropriating the patriarchal notion of what Laura Mulvey terms woman’s status as ‘looked-at-ness’.

Senanayak walks out surprised and sees Draupadi, naked, walking towards-him in the bright sunlight with her head high. The nervous guards trail behind her… Draupadi stands before him, naked. Thigh and public hair matted with dry blood. Two breasts, two wounds.’24

Confronting this spectacle is a moment of radical ontological and epistemological incomprehension for Senanayak, who prides himself on knowing the enemy better than themselves.. His learning, stressed many times in the text, is derived from narratives like Army Handbook, First Blood and his strength and preparedness to face the next episode, the next event comes from his mastery of certain texts. His prototype is the great Shakespearean hero Prospero. Senanayak is stunned by her action also because Draupadi Mejhen becomes the ‘counter-narrative’ (I am using the phrase deliberately) which exists beyond the syllabi of his strategic education. In Draupadi’s challenge of ‘come on counter me’ the term encounter is transformed becoming as Spivak points out ‘mysteriously close to the proper’ English usage. In this context it becomes feminist:

‘If woman has always functioned ‘within’ the discourse of man…… it is time for her to dislocate this ‘within’, to explode it, to turn it around, and seize it; to make it hers, containing it in her own mouth, biting the tongue with her very own teeth to invent for herself a language to get inside of.’25

Arun  KolatkarHaving once dis-proriated her given name, Draupadi Mejhen finally subverts all that is ‘proper’ for a rape victim.

Postscript

In the not-so-bizarre situation of narratives in real life following that of fiction, Soni Sori, an Adivasi schoolteacher was arrested in Dantewada, Chattisgarh in October 2011 on allegations of being a Maoist. She was stripped naked and given electric shocks and assaulted by police personnel who inserted stones in her vagina and anus. All of this was done under the instructions and in the presence of Ankit Garg, the Superintendent of Police, literally a sena-nayak, an IPS officer, who went on to receive gallantry awards from the Republic of India. The list is unending; very few of these cases receive media attention and result in public outcry.

Arun  KolatkarNot all events of brutal sexual assault on women are understood as narratives of ‘real rape’. They do not possess narrative potentials to affect the popular imaginary, to create phenomenon of massive mass mobilization.  Perhaps only feminist inscriptions will record and document events as well as protests, archiving them for analysis, turning them into fictions so that attempts can be made not only to interpret the world of narratives but also to narrativize a different world  for the habitation of men and women.




Phalanx SpacerPhalanx Spacer Notes/references:
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  1.
Kalpana Kannabiran and Ritu Menon, From Mathura to Manorama: Resisting Violence against Women in India ( New Delhi: Women Unlimited and International Centre for Ethnic Studies,2007) p.4.

  2.
I have used here what Brinda Karat said in an interview given to the Frontline, Januray 25, 2013, p.128

  3.
Carol Smart, Feminism and the Power of Law ( New York and London: Routledge,1989) p.33-4

  4.
Catherine Mackinnon, Towards a Feminist Theory of the State ( Camb. Mass: Harvard university Press, 1989) p 175

  5.
‘Lyotard is working with the etymological root of narrative: ‘gnarus’, the Greek verb meaning ‘to know’. Thus a narrative is, etymologically speaking, a form of knowledge, and a ‘narrator’ is ‘one who knows’, and so on’ From Introduction, Martin McQuillan ed., The Narrative Reader, ( London and New York: Routledge, 2000), p 2

  6.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak,  Feminism and Critical Theory,  In Other Worlds, ( New York and London: Routledge, 1984) p.122

  7.
Martin Mcquillan, Introduction, The Narrative Reader( London and New York: Routledge, 2000) p.7.

  8.

Nivedita Menon, Recovering Subversion: Feminist Politics Beyond Law, Delhi: Urbana and Chicago: Permanent Black/ University of Illinois Press, 2004.

  9.
Menon, Recovering Subversion, p.130

  10.
Sashi Kumar , ‘Portrayals of rape’ in Frontline, January 25, 2013, p.14

  11.
Andrew Bennet and Nicholas Royle, An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory: Key Critical Concepts ( London: Prentice Hall, 1995) p.41.

  12.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine, London and New York: Routledge, 1993, p 152,

  13.
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection Tr. Leon S Roudiez New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.

  14.
Patricia Klindienst,’ The Voice of the Shuttle is Ours’ in Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan ( ed) Literary Theory: An Anthology( Oxford: Blackwell, 1998) p.618.

  15.
Quoted in Samik Bandopadhyay, Bhumika,[ Introduction] Mahaswets Devir Chhotogalpo Sankalan,[ An anthology of Mahasweta Devi’s Short stories] ( New Delhi: Nation Book Trust, 1993) p.vii ( translation mine) 

  16.
Teresa de Lauretis, ‘Desire in Narrative’ in Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (London: Macmillan, 1984) p.157

  17.
Ibid.

  18.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Translator’s Foreword, “ Draupadi” by Mahasweta Devi, Critical inquiry, Vol 8 No. 2. Writing and Sexual Difference ( Winter 1981) p. 388

  19.
Ibid. p.387

  20.
Gayatri Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine, London and New York: Routledge, 1993, p 152,

  21.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Translator’s Foreword, “ Draupadi” by Mahasweta Devi  p.388.

  22.
Ibid. p.388

  23.

Mahasweta Devi ‘Draupadi’ translated by Gayatri Spivak, Critical Inquiry, p.401.

  24.
Ibid. p.402

  25.
Helen Cixous, Laugh of the Medusa   in New French Feminisms eds Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron, trans Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen ( New York: Schocken, 1981) pp.245-64, esp.p.257.




Swati Ganguly got her PhD from Jadavpur University. She is Associate Professor in English, Department of English and Other Modern European Languages, Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan. She has worked extensively in the area of Renaissance, feminism, gender studies as well as on media issues. She also writes fiction in Bengali.


Courtesy: www.thehindu.com
Courtesy: s1.firstpost.in
Courtesy: www.thehindu.com
Courtesy: kractivist.files.wordpress.com

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